A small (but glorious) world: The best microscope images of 2012

Spiders, fossils, brains, and eyes all make the grade.

Dr. Jennifer L. Peters and Dr. Michael R. Taylor of St. Jude Children's Research Hospital Memphis won with this optical stack of the brain's developing blood vessels.

Most people know Nikon as a purveyor of pro and consumer-grade digital cameras. But the company's expertise with optics bleeds over into related markets—it's one of the science community's major suppliers of microscopes. And each year the company asks the community to send it some of their favorite images of tiny objects. A panel of scientists and journalists have chosen the best of this past year's submissions, which Nikon has placed on its Small World site.

We've gone through and picked out some of our favorite images from this year, and Nikon provided some high-resolution versions. In keeping with the Ars tradition, where possible, we'll tell you a bit more about the subjects than you might get from the brief description on the original site.

The grand prize winner at top highlights the blood vessels as they form in the brain of a zebrafish. The fish itself is transparent at this stage of development, and the blood vessels are tagged with a fluorescent protein, which allowed the researchers to image these tiny vessels at 20 times their normal size. The image is actually a composite of many individual images taken with a confocal microscope.

Confocals only capture light from a single plane of focus, so each individual image is like an optical slice through the tissue. By changing the plane of focus and taking additional pictures, it's possible to create a stack of images (called a z-stack) that captures the three-dimensional details of the sample. In this case, the authors colored the blood vessels differently at different depths, allowing them to capture the sample's complexity.

Enlarge/ These recently hatched lynx spiders were imaged by Walter Piorkowski of South Beloit, Illinois.

Lynx spiders are a very successful genus, with members found on every continent. Their most notable feature is the hexagonal arrangement of six of their eight eyes (the remaining two vary in position). Some members of the species are hunters and don't build webs. These newly hatched spiders were photographed at 6x magnification using reflected light. Like a number of the other winners, this image relied on a different type of image stacking. Rather than providing depth, a series of short exposures are merged to create a single image with pixels being averaged. This helps get rid of any noise in each individual exposure.

Enlarge/ This image of an osteosarcoma cell comes courtesy of Dr. Dylan Burnette of the National Institutes of Health. Each color represents a different cellular component.

Cancer's an ugly disease, but damn, this image of a cancerous cell looks good. The cell is outlined in purple by structures called actin stress fibers, which essentially form a tiny skeleton made of protein that helps give the cell its shape. The yellow spaghetti-like structures are groups of mitochondria, a small structure within the cell that helps convert sugars and other energy sources into the ATP that powers most proteins. Finally, the nucleus glows blue thanks to a dye called DAPI that sticks to DNA. In this case, the image is magnified at 63x, and is the merger of three separate images, one for each color.

The red compound eyes of Drosophila have been such a huge part of the history of genetics, they're almost iconic. But for all of its early existence as a maggot, the fly uses a completely different set of eyes; the adult eyes only form while it's tucked away in a pupal case. This image captures the developing adult eye, showing its array of light-sensitive cells in (of course) red. These cells send signals back to the brain (green) using a huge bundle of axons, colored blue. That bundle of axons is much larger, relative to the eye itself, than the optic nerve we use to connect our eyes to the brain. This is another confocal image, and was probably made by flattening a z-stack of images, which is why there's such a good sense of depth.

Enlarge/ Marek Mis, a photographer from Poland, used polarized light to capture this image of a desmid.

If you told me this was a computer generated image of a mothership hovering over a planet's surface, I would have believed you. Instead, I had to look up desmids, which turned out to be a form of green algae. I would have guessed this is a cell in the process of dividing, but it turns out that one of the characteristic features of desmids is that they're a single cell divided into two compartments. (See, even I'm learning something from this.) Desmids are so tiny that this image was taken at 100x power. The green backdrop? It's a moss.

This image of an ant is much closer to life-sized, with only a 5x magnification. It's a pretty standard photo of an animal that everybody knows well, carrying its young (a pose I recall from my grad school days, when some ants tried to house their young in my shower). But the beauty is in the details, as the image stacking technique beautifully captures the delicate filaments and the fine details of the ant's antennae.

Enlarge/ Douglas Moore of the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point entered this image of a fossilized Turitella agate containing Elimia tenera (freshwater snails) and ostracods (seed shrimp).

Fossils, on their own, are pretty spectacular. But the mineralization of the sediments that often surrounds them adds a chance that they'll turn into something that more closely resembles a work of art. That's what happened in this case, where fossilized snail shells and ostraods have been embedded in a spectacular looking agate, which has since been sliced open and polished. The microscopy equipment needed to bring this to the fore is pretty minimal.

Enlarge/ Somayeh Naghiloo of the University of Tabriz's Department of Plant Biology captured this image of a garlic flower primordium.

When you work on animal development, you get used to watching tissues like a limb or spinal cord start out looking like a somewhat amorphous, cartoonish version of their later selves. Normally, this sort of thing is limited to the embryo, which is why biologists tend to be the only ones who see it. But for plants, this sort of developmental unfolding can literally take place thousands of times every year. In this particular case, the microscopists has captured a flower in the process of forming, with its various parts building up the cells needed to construct a colorful bloom, but still compressed into a compact form. A bonus is that it's a plant we don't even think about in terms of flowers: garlic.

Enlarge/ Charles Krebs, who runs his own photography studio, has equipment that's able to capture this image at 400x magnification. It contains Haematococcus (algae), Euplotes (protozoa), and Cyclidium (ciliate).

When the very first microscopes were made, their developers often turned them on a sample of water from a local source. Much to their surprise, the water was teeming with life. (You can now read one of the earliest descriptions online.) They had to attempt to capture what they saw by sketching it. We no longer face that kind of limitation, which is why we can look at spectacular images like this, at a magnification (400x) that the original microscopists never dreamed of. This image was taken with differential interference contrast, a technique that (as its name suggests), increases the contrast between objects, including ones that otherwise appear transparent. It also gives may structures a three-dimensional appearance, as you can see in the ciliated cells at center.

Enlarge/ Dr. Arlene Wechezak sent in this image of red algae called Ptilota.

This is a frond of red algae, captured in a darkfield image, where any area that doesn't have signal appears black. There's not a lot to say about it other than it seems to blur the boundaries between life and art.

If you find that you disagree with any of the choices made by the judges of this contest, Nikon is accepting votes for alternative winners on its Facebook page.

26 Reader Comments

Cool photos! I recently got a reversing ring to experiment with high-magnification photography and was impressed at how easy it was. The rings are less than $20 and you use your existing DSLR and lens. You can't quite achieve the magnification of all the photos above, but the insect ones (lynx spiders / ant + larvae) are easily doable. Focus-stacking definitely helps, too.

This is a frond of red algae, captured in a darkfield image, where any area that doesn't have signal appears black. There's not a lot to say about it other than it seems to blur the boundaries between life and art.

I personally might have worded that as ".... blur the boundaries of life, art, and math." It amazes me to see simple approximate fractals like that in nature. Such a simple (relativity) mathematical formula expressed in biology. Just wow.

What does it mean when the ant has a magnification of 5x? It sure looks bigger than 5 times ant-size (it pretty much fills me screen and it's just its head and part of the thorax), so it can't be that simple.

What does it mean when the ant has a magnification of 5x? It sure looks bigger than 5 times ant-size (it pretty much fills me screen and it's just its head and part of the thorax), so it can't be that simple.

My guess is that it means the image of the ant was 5x life size on the sensor that captured the image. Depending on the pixel density of the sensor compared to your monitor, of course, that will translate to a different net apparent magnification in your browser.

With apologies for the successive posts, I also wanted to say thanks for this article. I'm always enthralled by, for lack of a better term, the photography of science; these are some beautiful images. And they are much enhanced by the accompanying commentary which is so often lacking in these kinds of presentation.

I could have sworn the Lynx Spider photo was a painting until I enlarged it.

I was thinking exactly that. Even enlarged the spider photo has a sort of painted look about it that say, the ant photo doesn't have (to be clear, I am not even remotely implying it isn't real). The spider photo write up mentions "pixels being averaged", I wonder if that's a side-effect of the averaging.

That immunofluorescence image (the 3rd image) is fantastic! I'm really blown away by how good it is. I do immunofluorescence on a regular basis in grad school, and though my advisor tells me my IF images are excellent, they pale in comparison to that shot (see for yourself: https://dl.dropbox.com/u/675182/Composi ... RGB%29.tif). Now I'm going to have to look into their technique, though I suspect it involves an extremely expensive microscope and CCD camera...

All very pretty, but I have gripe. What does 10x, 100x etc. mean in the age of the CCD?

If you said "five microns per pixel", then, I would, understand. Even better, I would be able to tell how big thing in the image are. From Nikon's point of view talking about magnifications makes sense -- it is a property of the lens system, but as someone looking at the final image file I want to know about sizes.

All very pretty, but I have gripe. What does 10x, 100x etc. mean in the age of the CCD?

If you said "five microns per pixel", then, I would, understand. Even better, I would be able to tell how big thing in the image are. From Nikon's point of view talking about magnifications makes sense -- it is a property of the lens system, but as someone looking at the final image file I want to know about sizes.

Well, it depends on the particular setup (I think), but for instance my lab's microscope (a Carl Zeiss AxioObserver Z1 with MRm CCD camera) has a scaling of 0.1024 microns per pixel with our 63x objective (which is actually a final magnification of 630x), and I imagine these images have scalings in the same ballpark. 10x gives us 0.654 microns/pixel, 20x gives 0.3225 microns/pixel and 5x is 1.29 microns/pixel.

Oh and the author of this story could make it clearer by noting that, for instance, that ant image is labeled as being at 5x magnification, but it's almost certainly really 50x final magnification, as the objective magnification is magnified 10x by another lens in the eyepiece or camera setup. So a 63x objective really gives 630x, 20x gives 200x, etc.